What’s woke this week

Share This

A word to the woke

Wokeworld has been crammed with “c-words” this past week: climate, confessions and corn. I’ve picked through the stories – cut the crap — so you don’t have to.

Memorial meltdown

While the climate gabfest was taking place at the United Nations in New York and kiddie climateers were skipping school around Australia a memorial service was being held in the Swiss Alps. Attendees, some looking like escapees from a steampunk convention in their widow’s weeds and veils (yes, even some men, by the looks of some accompanying pictures), gathered for a Victorian-style funeral procession that took them high up into the Glarus Alps of northeast Switzerland.

Picturesque setting and fancy dress aside, you might say that this doesn’t seem too unusual, funeral services are being held all the time. But this one had ‘woke’ written all over it. The funeral march and service were held, not for a beloved relative or friend, but for a glacier. Yep. They were commemorating the passing of the Pizol glacier, which, according to one glacier specialist, has lost 80 per cent of its volume since 2006.

The ‘service’, organized by the Swiss Association for Climate Protection, even included a speech by a chaplain and wreath-laying. News reports estimated at the number of ‘mourners’ at between dozens and 250 — a bit like some climate change statistics.

This event echoes one held last month in Iceland where activists, scientists and politicians marked the ‘passing’ of the Okjökull glacier with a memorial event and a plaque inscribed with a ‘letter to the future’. You know. The one Greta says we’re not going to have.

Wooden-headed

Not content with merely anthropomorphising animals, plants and yes, even glaciers, wokesters — having given God the flick — find the need to deify the environment instead. And if you can sink the boot into the Catholic church while you’re doing it, so much the better. This week, not one but two instances of parodying the sacrament of confession in the name of climate activism, hit the headlines.

NYC’s impossibly woke interreligious Union Theological Seminary this week held a ‘beautiful ritual’: a chapel ceremony where participants confessed their ‘climate sins’ to plants. Unfortunately perhaps there was no man-eating Audrey II on hand to liven up proceedings, just an assortment of pot plants, some of which, ironically, looked sadly in need of a good watering.

Union Theological Seminary describes itself as a place “where faith and scholarship meet to reimagine the work of justice”. You’ll no doubt be pleased to learn that in practice that means they promote ‘eco-spirituality’ and ‘queer virtue’, get on board with the Twitterings of fantasist member of congress Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (including the Green New Deal), and offer courses in ‘black theology’.

Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor.

And, as people who live in a woke bubble often are, they were apparently gobsmacked at the merciless mocking that ensued online. Not to be deterred, they doubled down offering some other gems like:

Theologies that encourage humans to dominate and master the Earth have played a deplorable role in degrading God’s creation. We must birth new theology, new liturgy to heal and sow, replacing ones that reap and destroy.

And my personal favourite:

Because plants aren’t capable of verbal response, does that mean we shouldn’t engage with them?

If only that extended to watering them.

Climate confessions

I’m not sure why, because no-one attempts to articulate its purpose, but over at NBC News, you’ll find Climate Confessions. Here you’ll be encouraged to confess your climate sins out into the internet, because in wokeworld we all know that if it isn’t online it didn’t happen. Of course, if voyeurism is more your thing you can get off on the lurid declarations of others who ‘fall short in preventing climate change’.

You can click on six categories — plastics, meat, energy, transportation, paper and food waste — to confess or read earth-shattering or pointless pearls of wisdom like these:

I don’t always recycle my plastic; removing the paper label is a pain. And I still use plastic straws.

I use paper towels instead of a cloth to wipe my kitchen counter.

Oh, the horror of it all!

But here’s one that’s really sad:

Even though my partner and I rely largely on soy and insects for our protein intake, I still sneak some pieces of boiled chicken.

Wokeworld – a place where boiled chicken is a guilty treat.

Cereal rapists

On Wisconsin Public Radio this week Native American plant ecologist and director of the Centre for Native Peoples and the Environment, Robyn Wall Kimmerer, came out swinging against genetically modified corn.

Kimmerer considers heirloom native corn to be sacred:

There’s a reason corn is revered in almost every culture of corn-growing people as the ‘Corn Mother.’ Her kernels are not just stuff — every one of those seeds is an offspring — a baby. Corn is sacred because she gives us her children in return for us protecting and caring for those children by planting them again.

But not only that, she describes corn as:

[O]ne of our deepest and oldest relatives. We’re literally made of it; when scientists analyze the tissues of American bodies, they call us ‘walking Fritos.’